INTERVIEW: Jenny Mitchell on her new album 'Tug of War': "It's been really fun to not care so much about exactly what genre it is."

New Zealand’s Jenny Mitchell is the type of artist that creates music that is timeless yet contemporary, genre-less but comfortingly familiar and always, always warm, immersive and relatable.

At the end of July she released her third album Tug of War. Written and recorded through the lockdowns of the pandemic, the album reflects a period of great change in Mitchell’s life. She graduated from university, saw her musical career stall as lockdowns hit, lost her grandfather, experienced the breakup of a relationship and moved from her long term base in Dunedin to Wellington.

“Tug of War is years of writing, recording, filming and collaborating,” she says. “When I reflect on the process now, this collection of songs are so much more than I initially imagined they’d be. Like many in their early twenties, my life has been turned inside out in the past couple of years. I’ve lost people, learnt lessons and also had some of the best moments of my life along the way. So it’s fair to say this record is a bit of a mixed bag. I feel very lucky to have created it with the incredible players and producers that I did.”

Across 10 tracks, Mitchell explores country, folk and classic singer-songwriter pop, with the sound ranging from dark and moody to uplifting and hopeful. The album opens with latest single ‘If You Were A Bird’, a gentle love song with guitar and cello that celebrates a new relationship that brings a new found sense of peace, security and contentment. Second track ‘Make Peace With Time’ is another lush ballad, which projects an indiepop mixed with country sound. Album standout ‘Somehow’ is a beguiling mix of country and rock, with ukulele blending with a heavy beat and electric guitar in a soundscape that evokes sensations of a night time drive through a dark and stormy landscape. ‘Holding’ is a moving guitar ballad, while ‘Tomorrow’ leans more heavily into a country sound and ruminates on the co-dependence of love and hurt: ‘Sometimes you can’t have love without hurt / And neither of which I want to forget’, she sings. The album ends on the heartbreaking ‘Love Isn’t Words’ which openly and honestly explores the death of Mitchell’s grandfather. Although it deals with a confronting topic, it ends on a note of hope: ‘Love isn’t words / Its working through the cold and the dirt / And being there even when it hurts’.

Tug of War is Jenny Mitchell at her finest. It is an intimate, honest and emotional listen that still finds the joy through its beautiful melodies and vocals. It is an album to experience and savour as a body of work and is an enriching listening experience you will want to return to again and again. We recently caught up with Mitchell to chat more about the creation of the album.

Hi Jenny. My goodness you have released a very beautiful album! How are things with you?
Really great. It took me two years of putting the album together and recording it through all the ups and downs of the pandemic so it's just been really fun finally letting it go.

You clearly put everything into this album, there's so much depth to every single song, it's gorgeous. Where did this collection come from? Where did it originate from as a whole?
[I had] a new relationship, a new love and I thought it was going to be really simple, straightforward album, and it's not! I basically thought I was going to write a love album, I guess. There is lots of love in it, but not not all just the relationship kind. I started writing the songs years ago and collected them, ‘Lucy’ is quite an old one, like three years old. I just kept writing after my last album and when I knew there was one that felt like it wanted to stay in my life I started making a little list. I had about five of the tracks and then I started writing with the album in mind after that.

‘If You Were A Bird’ kicks off the album and it is this very beautiful, love song. It's so abundant with its simplicity of sound. In regards to your writing, is it a melody that comes first, is it prose, is it a feeling? Because there are so many layers to your songs.
I get asked this question a lot and I never quite know how to answer it. It’s lyric driven, that's what I'm thinking about. If I'm sitting down and writing I'm not usually thinking about what would be a fun melody, I'm just thinking about the story. But I've always got a guitar in my hand at the same time. I don't really ever sit down and go ‘okay, we're gonna write like a really cool guitar lick today’, I'm thinking lyrical prose first. Sometimes if I'm driving along in the car and humming to myself I might come up with a lyric, but generally I'll always be sitting down with a guitar.

Title track ‘Tug of War’ is such a grin inducing song despite the battle that's going on inside you, ‘my heart will always be a tug of war with my head’. It's such a beautiful song, can you talk me through a little bit about the creation of this one and its composition?
The song itself and what it means as the title is a bit different. The song itself is a song about running into an old flame. It's sort of self explanatory, I guess, but basically, I ran into an ex partner of mine, and felt all the feelings come back. I hadn't seen him for a couple of years, and that feeling, you just feel like you've been kicked in the guts or something. A lot had happened in that time, I must have been 20 and I hadn't seen him since I was 18. A lot happens in that time frame of your life, and I felt like a different person. I had this interesting moment where we just sort of caught up and I was feeling like I was in high school again, and he was my high school boyfriend. I'm someone that very much wears my heart on my sleeve, and am always driven very much by emotion, so I felt this really big pull to my younger self and into him. Ultimately, I made a decision, which was the right decision, to not pursue that anymore.

People often avoid talking about the fact that when you do see someone that's been important to you, you do feel something sometimes. And that's okay. It's pretty much a song just acknowledging that, it's alright for those feelings to come up, as long as you ultimately make the right decision for you in the end.

What was it about that that for you so encompassed the collection as a whole for it to be the album title?
As I was saying before, initially, it was going to be this really simple love album and then so many things happened. I moved cities and left a job, [single] ‘Trouble Finds A Girl’ was a big journey for me, learning about how to protect my sisters and growing up in that way and feeling responsible for people, which I haven't before. And then there’s songs later in the album about losing my granddad and things like that. Big life moments that are often packed into your early 20s. There was lots of ups and downs, very wonderful times and then darker times in the past couple of years and so ‘tug of war’ sort of explained that feeling of being pulled in lots of different directions and how it all can happen in such a short amount of time and somehow we just keep going.

Beautiful, I'm so glad you pulled on that as well because it really does encompass so much in an album and you've definitely pushed yourself, you've gotten further into your confidence as a writer and a performer with this album. What were you doing when putting this one together, where did all this power come from in putting this this creature together? Because it's quite something.
When I look at my last record and compare the two, the difference is that I wasn't as worried about fitting into what country is, not for negative reasons because I love country music. When I was making my last album, I was like, ‘Oh, this feels so good, this feels really country and this is right’ whereas this time, songs like ‘Somehow’ and even ‘Trouble Finds A Girl’ they're really a lot bigger and darker, topics and sound wise, then what I have done before. Writing ‘Trouble Finds A Girl’ with Tami Neilson definitely helped me to sing about that topic that I had wanted to for a long time but didn't quite know how to. Having that support definitely helped me to follow that new direction. Also I had a lot of time to make this album because we did it remotely. Pretty much for a whole year we went back and forth with songs. Because we were all in lockdown I had a lot of the players playing their parts from their home studios, so I had lots of time listening back to the cello track and deciding I'd like more of it here or less of it here or whatever. You don't usually have that luxury when you're in a studio, trying to play to a budget. Usually you've got like 40 minutes left and you've got to get stuff done. It was just a really different process, the combination of collaborating with awesome people, and just having the time to let me try out some different stuff.

You're so right, you're in a different headspace as well. Even if you feel very comfortable with the people you're recording with, there's always that money's on the clock feeling.
And also, not just money but the players on the album are so amazing, and often, when you're wrapped up in the moment in the studio, they play something, and it's incredible, and you can't possibly imagine something better sometimes. There's something quite beautiful about that as well, that it just happens and that's a snapshot of exactly how it was played and how it is. But you definitely get clouded by the excitement and don't really have the time to step back and be like, ‘maybe actually the song needs less of that’. So I had more time to do that.

You said before about finding that avenue of country folk sound to some songs and how you needed to find new sounds to add weight to them. Country music historically is a storytelling genre, and your stories were becoming much more real with troubled times of today. Was it the separation of country sounds from quite grisly subject matter in ‘Trouble Finds A Girl’ that made you decide you needed a different sound because this isn’t just an old story, this is a something that happens now, and all the time.
Yeah, it’s good question. ‘Trouble’ and ‘Somehow’, probably ‘Trouble’ more so is quite a big vocal song compared to a lot of other songs that I sing. ‘Lucy’, for example, is the polar opposite of those songs. I explored that, with the support of Tami because she typically does a lot more vocal acrobatic stuff than me. When we started writing that melody, it felt so good, we knew that it was a song that needed this big powerful vocal. When we started doing that, I was like, ‘oh this is not just going to be bass and a banjo’, which is sometimes how we approach a lot of my tracks. The subject matter definitely encouraged me to lean into the bigger sound or the darker sound. But in saying that, people like Alison Krauss they have that darker sound and maybe not traditional, country country, but to me it’s all folk and country. Even though it's maybe a little part of country that I haven't explored before, when I hear it, it still sounds like a lot of the albums that I grew up listening to or that have influenced me, so I still feel like it fits there. But it's been really fun to not care so much about exactly what part of the genre that is.

Exactly! The [physical] album closes with ‘The Bush and the Birds’ with your sisters, Megan and Nicole. It's such a beautiful anchor to the album as a whole. Can you talk me through a little bit about this one because I think it's just the perfect bookend.
Oh thank you. It's probably one of my favourites, it's deeply personal [but] it wasn't ever actually going to be a song that I recorded. I wrote it about my granddad who passed away but had a long, long, wonderful life and it was like exactly how it was meant to be kind of thing. He really passed down this love of nature and especially of birds to me and my family. At the end of ‘Love Isn’t Words’, which is a song about watching dad lose grandad and how that was such a huge heavy moment as an older person, older than I was the last time I lost a grandparent which was a long time ago. When I was 11, I was only thinking about me - I'm sad. I found this experience to be just really heavy, thinking about how colossal that moment is to lose your dad. I was feeling all my aunties and uncles and everything, we were all together and it was a big thing. ‘Love Isn't Words’ is about that and there's a little piece in the middle of some native New Zealand birds that we put on the record. Not many people are going to know this, but when my granddad died, they took him back to the farm and my grandma was like, ‘we need to put him in the bush with the birds’. So for his last morning, at home, he was outside in their beautiful backyard, which has just got all these native birds everywhere. So that felt like a really cool way to put that story in there. It was a really personal song. I had ‘Love Isn’t Words’ that I really wanted to record and have on the album, and then I had written ‘The Bush and the Birds’ long before he died. He'd heard it and it wasn't a reflection of him after he passed, it was an ode to his life. I played it for a couple of people after he had died and they were like, ‘Oh my God, that sounds like my dad’, or ‘that sounds like my uncle’ so I realised that there's a lot of stoic farmers out there and we decided to put it on at the end.

That's so beautiful. I love that a song can travel that far that you even have this as the song for the stoic fathers. Jenny, you have this gorgeous album out now that you should be incredibly proud of and you're just going to be riding high on that for a while. Tell me what else is coming up for you this year.
At the end of this month I'm going on tour for pretty much every weekend for the rest of the year. We're hitting the road with the full band for the first time so I'm feeling really excited about the collaboration and being able to play a show that actually sounds like the record because I haven't been able to do that before.

Tug of War is out now via Cooking Vinyl Australia. You can download and stream now. The vinyl album will be released on October 14 and can be pre-ordered here.

To keep up with all things Jenny Mitchell you can follow her on Instagram and Facebook.